Meir Shalev, whose novels affectionately satirizing Israel’s pioneers made him one of the nation’s leading writers, died on Tuesday at his home in the village of Alonei Abba in northern Israel’s Jezreel Valley. He was 74.
His agent, Deborah Harris, said the cause was pancreatic cancer.
Often compared to Mark Twain for the arch humor lacing his novels and to Gabriel García Márquez for his use of magical realism, Mr. Shalev focused most of his seven novels on the half-century before Israeli independence in 1948.
It was a period when Zionists, socialists and Communists migrated to Ottoman- or British-controlled Palestine to escape the alienation and pogroms of Eastern Europe. As captured most saliently in his first novel, “The Blue Mountain,” they soon found themselves breaking their backs farming a resistant landscape while grappling with mosquito-borne diseases and attacks by Arabs.
The scenes of intellectuals trying to live up to lofty ideals in these circumstances made for incidents ripe with poignant comedy. Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, professor emerita of comparative literature at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, described “The Blue Mountain” as “a comment on the noble but failed utopian experiment of the pioneers.”
“He didn’t just write about the pathos of Israel; he also wrote about its absurdities,” she said. “He almost invented Israeli satire.”
“His writing wasn’t just comic,” Professor Ezrahi added. “He had a soul. The tears would come through the laughter.”
Mr. Shalev, who also wrote eight works of nonfiction and 14 children’s books, was translated into more than 30 languages, according to Ms. Harris, his agent.
His novel “A Pigeon and a Boy” (2006), which weaves the story of a handler of homing pigeons killed in the 1948 war with that of an Israeli tour guide in a troubled marriage, won the Brenner Prize, Israel’s highest literary honor.
In contrast to the work of contemporaries like David Grossman and Amos Oz, Mr. Shalev’s fiction seldom drifted into the messy, acid-tongued politics of Israel and the complexities of resolving the Palestinian push for a homeland.
Those views, he said, he reserved for his weekend columns in the national newspaper Yediot Ahronot, which he wrote for over 30 years, offering a popular voice for a two-state solution to the conflict with Palestinians.
“I don’t like to use my art to promote my political views, and I don’t use my political ideas to promote my literature,” he told Moment magazine in a 2017 interview.
Although he was on Israel’s moderate left, advocating a freeze of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and the creation of an autonomous Palestinian state, Mr. Shalev “insisted that everybody bore responsibility” for the stalemate, the literary critic Leon Wieseltier, editor of the quarterly Liberties, said in a phone interview on Wednesday.
Mr. Shalev told the German magazine Der Spiegel in 2009: “Radical Palestinians still say that the only solution would be for all Jews to pack their bags and return to where their grandparents came from. When there are no more Jews left in the Middle East, then the problem is solved, according to their logic. As long as they continue to think that way, there will be no peace.”
Mr. Shalev was not an observant Jew and avoided his other home, in Jerusalem, because the city, in his view, was so infused with religion and populated by the pious. Nevertheless, he was a connoisseur of biblical stories and wrote two books analyzing them, including “Beginnings: Reflections on the Bible’s Intriguing Firsts” (2011), in which he mused on the first love, the first hate, the first dream and the like, making surprising choices.
The first love, by Mr. Shalev’s reckoning, was not between Adam and Eve or Abraham and Sarah but between Abraham and his son Isaac, demonstrated when Abraham is called by God to sacrifice Isaac as a test of Abrahams’s fealty and trust.
“I don’t think the story is intended to combat the practice of human sacrifice, but rather to demonstrate how the obedience of the Bible’s most obedient believer may lead into the darkest of alleys,” he wrote.
A favorite of Mr. Shalev’s readers was a comic work of nonfiction, the affectionate memoir “My Russian Grandmother and Her American Vacuum Cleaner” (2011). It tells the story of the author’s maternal grandmother, a plucky socialist pioneer who receives a General Electric model (or “svieeperrr,” as she calls it) from a flourishing American relative, then locks it away, afraid it will get dirty from the ubiquitous dust in her village.
“Everyone had a grandmother like that,” Ms. Harris said.
Mr. Shalev’s grandmother was a lively storyteller, abounding in tales of the old days on the moshav, an Israeli cooperative farming community. It was she who had inspired him to write “The Blue Mountain.”
Meir Shalev was born on July 29, 1948, the same year Israel became an independent country, in Nahalal, the country’s first moshav. Nahalal was notable for its circular design, with individual plots of land radiating out like the spokes of a wheel, and for its European exiles, like the family of the illustrious general Moshe Dayan.
The Shalevs were a literary family. His father, Yitzhak, was a published poet; his mother, Batya (Ben-Barak) Shalev, was a high school literature teacher. An uncle, Mordechai Shalev, was a literary critic; a cousin, Zeruya Shalev, is also an acclaimed writer.
Mr. Shalev recalled in an interview with The Jerusalem Post in 2007 that his mother “made sure I read only good literature, like Mark Twain, Sholem Aleichem, Charles Dickens.”
“There was no censorship in the house I grew up in,” he said, “and by the age of 14 my father had brought me ‘Lolita’ and said, ‘Here, this is a book about a girl your age.’ No parent back then let his child read this book at that age, but my father thought it was a masterpiece and that I should read it.”
The family moved to Jerusalem, where Mr. Shalev eventually studied art and psychology at Hebrew University. Drafted in 1966, before he started college, he joined the storied Golani Brigade as the squad commander in a reconnaissance company. Driving an ambulance in the lingering skirmishes that followed the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, he was wounded by four bullets in a friendly-fire incident.
For many years Mr. Shalev produced radio and television programs and hosted his own talk show. Turning 40, he told Moment, he felt his work “was not something I myself would appreciate,” so he quit his television job and began writing children’s books and then “The Blue Mountain.”
He is survived by his wife, Rina Shalev; a son, Michael; a daughter, Zohar; a brother, Zur, a historian at Haifa University; and two grandchildren. His sister, Rafaela, died in 2020.
“What distinguished his prose was its vitality,” Mr. Wieseltier said. “Everything about his writing is so vivid and alive. And he was wickedly funny.”
In writing about the Bible, Mr. Shalev noted that the Tenth Commandment, unlike the other nine, is a prohibition against coveting — that is, against feeling, not action.
“Everyone covets,” he wrote. “Everyone fails the last commandment. Thus, the biblical lawgiver made sure that no Jew would ever get a perfect 10 in the test of the commandments. Nine is the highest score on the Jewish report card.”
